May kickoff: Cool in much of the U.S., summer-like in South Florida

May is forecast to start out cool for much of the U.S., except in Florida and the U.S. West Coast. (Credit: NOAA/ CPC)

The arrival of the new month will bring some familiar weather conditions to South Florida — heat and humidity.

Temperatures in Palm Beach are expected to be in the upper 70s through Wednesday, but forecasters say changes are afoot for the end of the week. The trigger will be high pressure that’s expected to build over the area on Saturday and Sunday, pushing temperatures into the 90s inland with mid- to upper-80s in coastal areas.

Forecast highs Saturday and Sunday in Palm Beach are in the low 80s but lows should only sink into the mid-70s, according to the National Weather Service. Weather Underground is calling for a high of 85 both days and AccuWeather predicts a high of 84 in Palm Beach Sunday — May 1 — but 87 on Monday and 88 on Tuesday.

Rain chances will be confined to North Florida and the panhandle, where a front is expected to stall.

A cool start to May is forecast for a wide swath of the Central U.S., from Texas north through the Mississippi Valley and into the Great Lakes States and New England. But Florida will apparently buck the trend with exceptionally toasty temps from Orlando south into the Keys.

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SURPRISING POLLUTION SOURCE: Next time you take a dip in the ocean you may be battling more than rough surf and jellyfish. The world’s oceans are awash in plastic, an oceanographer at the University of Delaware says.

Up to 13 million metric tons was dumped into the water in 2010 alone, according to Tobias Kukulka. What makes matters worse is that you can’t usually see the plastic because it becomes brittle over time and breaks into tiny fragments.

The pieces can drift to the surface and be mistaken by birds and fish for food.

“You have stuff that’s potentially poisonous in the ocean and there is some indication that it’s harmful to the environment, but scientists don’t really understand the scope of this problem yet,” says Kukulka, associate professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment’s School of Marine Science and Policy.

“My research has shown that ocean turbulence actually mixes plastics and other pollutants down into the water column despite their buoyancy. This means that surface measurements could be wildly off and the concentration of plastic in the marine environment may be significantly higher than we thought.”